Thursday, July 30, 2015

I had this title in my Earthquakes g+ collection. As you know, g+ is for people who don't talk much, and that's a lousy basis for social network. It will never pull in more money than it costs.

Basically, the title refers to the massive purge of earthquake intellect from that fine state. Nobody will now touch it with a barge-pole, except me. The last investigative journalists from Tulsa were kicked out by the tabloid king, and went to this thing. The web site clicks on and off, as they struggle to find coins in the sewer.

I love these guys, but an online journal on Tulsa? On corruption in Oklahoma? They will have to get members to pay big bucks for 'exclusive' content, and that never works. The last such magazine was the Economist, and I stopped paying for it when they supported Global Warming. :) Even the New Yorker has to publish a ridiculous sensational earthquake article, and then they backed down. It was written by the book critic.

The last job of regular newspapers is to get talking heads to say nothing significant. They are the only ones to get access to the self-serving celebrities. All the breaking news is now on YouTube. :)

To follow the old model, these people need money to travel, and to eat. My writing costs me nothing and I get nothing for it. I never want to enter controversy, because then you need money to protect yourself. Can you imagine me going against the old company, or frackers? It's best that they laugh me off.

Finally conclusion. These poor guys are dead. If you are a crazy rich guy then pay them some money, as if that's going to happen....

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

I finally found the damage! Ok people, this was an M5, you're fooling yourself with M4.5. It was also a true Intensity 7, with the structural damage. The busgus got rid of that report, and said it was 6.

Note the ceiling tile damage. The network cable was a huge weight, and these things are never tied. Duck and cover for sure. Had this been a thrust, I shudder to think.

Addendum: I'm thinking this is 10 cm/s PGV on firm ground, since I don't think OK has saturated swamp. A true M5 in the East.

PS. no more Austin Holland to kick around any more. He's gone. Here's what I wrote in g+

Ode to Austin

Standing in front,
Rotten tomatoes thrown,
He states it's all natural,
But inside he cries.

I hope he has a good job now, joining the busgus. He probably has a contract that says he never has to go into that crazy state. ﻿

This is a screen shot of the ocean currents. El Nino is fighting the prevailing currents. It could actually die right here, like last time. If it makes it, it will deflect up and down like the second half which shows how the Atlantic current deflects up and saves Great Britain.

None of these currents are tremendously stable over centuries. That's what makes up warm and cold spells. If they go really wild, then we get a mini ice age. I've written what we need for a real ice age, and we got another 5000 years to go. I've also written what this means to crazy globular warming (sic).

Addendum: You can easily see how we get a mini ice age. If the Atlantic current decides to go south more, all the deflection goes to Argentina. The North is frozen out. All this energy is orders of magnitude above cow farts warming us. :)

Monday, July 27, 2015

Europe reported it as an M5.1, I waited 'forever' for the USGS report. I thought it was a phantom earthquake, but it probably clipped all their seismometers.

Here's the felt area.

This gives an intensity 7 at the zero zone. I can't wait to read what that was. I hope it was chimneys! I love chimneys. :) This was a 'normal' or tension earthquake. Had it been an M5 thrust, for which I've been waiting a year now, it would have lifted all those seismometers off the ground. There are no strong motion instruments out there, so we can't get a record PGV.

This leads to an essay that I was just about to write. I just glanced at a book that was all hot on scientific corruption with the title about Gallieo giving the finger. She was going on about that this was a serious problem. Is it any worse than in Newton's time? Of course not. Scientific corruption, such as the busgus, or my old company, is something to laugh at. Add in Climate Science. All these guys go against basic physics and look silly when they have to apply it something. Sure they suck off money, but so does everything else.

Look at OK. The busgus seagull flies in and does a poop on the head. They have never looked at Eastern Seismicity in their lives, and decide it's pressure. Reduce the pressure and the earthquakes go up. It's hilarious.

We used to have nothing but 3's all the time, then nothing but 4's. Now the 5's are coming in. Rots of ruck.

Addendum

Ok, here we have the puny M4 coming in to Ontario Polaris

You can see just at the end of the trace, uniform on all stations.

And here's the big one.

Dat's a big sucka! You get a sense of exponentials here, and I'm happier with an M5.1 rather than the M4.5. But Say La Vee.

Add2: Lots of activity around this area, which is unusual, since a big earthquake usually quenches for a while. They must be injecting the good stuff, since the increase in magnitude is an Arkansas rate.

Time for an essay that nobody reads! This is just for my fun, standing on my soapbox in the park, screaming at everyone.

You've met them at work, the type that does everything verbally, yack and yack. Outlook email didn't fix anything, since they just learned to type. Many people have 25,000 emails in their Inbox, all from yackers, who cc anybody and their dog, just to make sure. :)

I am a male technical purist, and I call myself a 'grunter'. Two of us can make a two-hour conversation in "Going fishing?" "Yep".

Now here's where artificial divisions come in, just like the old 'Venus and Mars'. His divisions were at the 80-90% mark, and he called them absolute. I'll do that, too. Don't yada-yada me about the exceptions, who cares?

My category is "Intellectual Depressives", who are 90% northern male, descended from Barbarians. So, the world is divided into Barbarians and Romans (late Romans, the early ones were barbarians), or Grunters and Yappers. I'm not talking about shy people, we're talking about people who use their entire brain to crystallize things into two words.

As you can guess, the Grunters are considered anti-social, look at Google+ versus Facebook. They aren't really, they just don't like to yap, and parties make them uncomfortable. But they are a powerful force in the world.

Take the start of any technical company. It's a bunch of grunters, all white males who do powerful things, like Blackberry. Their productivity is orders of magnitude above that of any other company, and they don't talk.

I saw these in California. Just stuns the mind, and the money people are just the same. These companies usually follow the same path, they need yackers to deal with customers. The Romans can't interface with the Barbarians, and they hire more yackers. They complain about the grunters that they 'hate us'. No woman alone could survive that, she needs some friends. Now comes the huge mistake that eventually destroys the company -- they hire yackers for Human Resources. Soon all the new hires are yackers who got the job by impressing yackers. That's the end. Goodbye Blackberry, and the yackers have the best parties with lots of booze.

Google may be fending this off, by having 'grunter' hiring practices like weird tests. The best organization I know is Linux, which is headed by the Biggest Barbarian on the street - Crazy Linus. Everybody is judged by what they do, not how well they impress. This organization is a 1000 times more productive (per person) than MS. Of course, when an organization gets big, they get in trouble for not hiring 'yacker diversity'.

My old company was totally taken over by incompetent yackers when we stopped building nuclear plants. Now they are digging a black hole, and trying to restore a plant that fell apart in only 20 years. There is no hope for them.

The only hope for starting companies is not to hire 'pure yackers' but the one in million person who can span both worlds. This is a person with intellect and social skills. My sons are like that, but I've met many women like that. Usually, they are just the CEO, but the company needs these people as managers. At the old company we had many people like that, until they all left for better things.

So, I'm now trying not to be sexist. As the famous biologist said, you can't just drop a woman into a company of male grunters, but, on the other hand, no company can stay that 'pure' for long. It's just a matter of whether you can keep things growing and productive, or head for destruction.

Wait! I've got to get back to the title. The Internet has allowed anti-social grunter organizations to become much more powerful before they fall apart. Look at Uber! If they can last a couple of years, they can take down inefficient yacker organizations. IBM is falling apart. The world is changing.

Monday, July 20, 2015

All the states hate each other. They'd be shooting but for the damn Feds who control the army. All the states have is the puny National Guard, which is only good for shooting protesters. You can see this in their geological maps which end at the border, and make no effort whatsoever to splice with the enemy. In fact, when we needed a magnetic survey we gave up on New York and Pennsylvania meeting, so we flew our own plane without telling anyone.

Okay, it's sort of a geological war, but it's intense. Look at the latest earthquakes.

Twin 4's aimed at Kansas. The weapons misfired a bit, since they were felt all over, but had they been large strike-slip, all that energy would have blasted Wichita. And there would have been no press in OK City.

They're lining up all the wells along the border, and getting the good stuff from the East. What are the Kansas weenies going to do? Cry to the busgus? Those guys only get off their tanning beds for something important, and Kansas isn't it. Besides, none of them want to be known as the 'Eastern Earthquake Guy', because that's exile to Oklahoma City. So they write the play 'All the World is California', so they can zoom in, plop a little wisdom, and fly out. "We are all California earthquake experts!"

Sunday, July 19, 2015

It's so slow now. Like watching the grass grow. A little cluster near the city got everybody excited, but that went away. Wait until Iran releases it's oil for terrorism. Maybe we'll hit $40 a barrel, and they might as well roll up the sidewalks.

Saturday, July 18, 2015

If you look at this link, you can get this picture. You have to click in once more to get the animation.

It shows a full reversal of the hot water, streaming back to North America, and spilling over to Japan. Note that Australia gets sucked dry. Hope they have water stored up. This reflects in the new moist air currents:

Now we must note that these clouds are the maximum insulators that the earth can have. In other words, we cannot turn into a Venus, but it can only go as hot as the equator. Big deal to millions living there. All the heat that escapes back to space has to spill out from this band. The band is really wacked out now because of the reversal. California is going to be one big mud slide. Who knows what happens to Canada.

So why is almost every city in danger of being wiped out at 1 in 500? That's because everybody and their dog build to living memory, which is about 1 in 100. Thus New Orleans only builds seawalls for Granpappy's Great Storm. They wouldn't get any money to build better.

There was this guy who saved a Japanese coastal village by building a 50 foot high seawall. He inspired everybody and got the money. That's because he knew the difference between a run-up on a cliff and the height of water on the flats. Basic physics and momentum. Nobody else knew their basic physics.

But that never happens anywhere else and the tsunamis he was building against were 'every day' M8's. He was on the fringe of the M9. So, with earthquakes, if Granpappy remembers something, you'll build for it. That's what happened in California. So they only get wiped out if you have a coast-raising M9, which they claim is impossible. :) And only on the deep basins.

Take Toronto, a chance of an M7 or greater at 1 in 500. The only disaster they ever built for was Hurricane Hazel in 1954, at 1 in 100. It's all 'La La La' for anything else. That M7, which is reflected in the recent sediments, would cause a nuclear release at Pickering, wipe out all the bridges, and put out the power for a month. Tough being in a 70 story condo! Would kill 500.

It's a great article, but the main impact comes from the implication that it is 'overdue', and will happen 'tomorrow'. Thus, taken in isolation, it's an 'Oh my God!' moment.

Well, I call 'Bullshoot' on this one. (I have a world audience :). Devastation there is at the same odds as devastation anywhere, about 1 in 500 per year. This means that nearly all cities take a pair of 25-sided dice and roll it on New Year's Day. Anybody who roles 'snake eyes' or double ones, gets destroyed that year.

In Japan and other places, this means 20,000 killed, merely because of population density. For less dense places, we're talking something like New Orleans, or Christchurch, perhaps hundreds killed, and economic devastation.

So why does Seattle get relegated to this dung heap, rather than 'tomorrow'? It's because of uncertainties, and the fact that this subduction zone is a weenie. Let's look at some 'real' subduction zones.

Look at that beauty in the middle. That's the big M9 Japan earthquake, and goes every 800 years, based on actual history.

Sumatra, historical may give 500 years.

My favourite.

Mexico, probably the same as Japan, but not looked at, since it beams away from Japan, and nobody has crawled over the shores.

Here's Cascadia.

Look at that stupid thing! Totally mucky, but we must account for sediments, even though it can't be greater than Japan. This is suffering from 'over study', which takes things out of context. That's why they get their '200 year' thing. Pile those equivalent resources anywhere else and see what happens.

Friday, July 10, 2015

I'm really going to say that the rate of increase of magnitude is down. Kansas is enjoying a summer holiday, but Ok. City had a big flurry last week. It's interesting to think how the rate should go up as the earthquakes become larger. Since the magnitude scale is exponential, and the fault area goes by the square, some things should slow down. Stress corrosion would go on a steady rate if the pumping of surface water is steady. At the beginning of this whole thing, I'm sure the pumping was increasing exponentially. Now, I have no idea what is going on.

But we see more clusters, at places where they aren't even pumping, just because the whole thing is one mechanism. There is also the 'tipping bucket' effect when the whole thing just goes, much like a landslide. The big experiment continues, and it is fascinating.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

A very large storm was coming. It had been predicted for days. I saw it was only going to last half a day, and I love storms at the cottage, so I went up anyway. The pre-storm had SW gales up to 50 klicks, and I was enjoying it on the deck. We have a high view, so I can see everything. The waves were 2 feet on our end of the lake, but the south half has the whole reach in the SW direction, and it always builds up a good wave, much higher.

So, it was with great surprise, that I saw an entire day-care centre paddling broadside to the waves right under my nose. I was the only one in the bay, and practically the only one on the lake. The had 2 adult paddlers towing another canoe with 3 5-year-olds. The other canoe had 2 ten-year-olds and a grandma at the back. It was amazing they came this far in the full reach. They should have taken the north shore which was in the lee of the wind. Even if they had done this, they wouldn't have survived the main reach.

They were paddling in circles, well flagged, and being driven against the cliff. I still couldn't believe what I was seeing, but I got the big boat ready. I knew it was a nasty storm because my cell signal had completely vanished, and I couldn't get a radar picture for the thunderstorms. I kept looking at the sky.

By the time I got there, the mom was out of the canoe trying to hold it away from the cliff. I said to them that I could tow them, or we could wait out the storm. They were in a hurry, and there was nothing happening in the sky. If something had been bearing down on us, they wouldn't have had a choice. The adults, brother and sister, decided they would paddle, and I towed the rest. Halfway there, it was too dangerous, so I put everybody in the boat. The tiny kids were terrified of Roxie the rescue dog, but we threw them in anyway. Roxie was very polite.

I towed the empty canoes to the marina, and was surprised to see the OPP boat. There was nobody on the lake for them to harass. I said hi, and told them what we were doing, and they just wanted to know if we were okay. I suppose they were responding to something.

Dumping them at the marina, I went back for the two paddlers. They had just got into the full reach, and I was watching them paddle as hard as they could and not getting anywhere. I had been in that situation many times. So I came in close, dinged the damn prop, and got them loaded up. They were so nice, they wanted to cross the nasty strait, but I said their family was waiting for them

Reminded me when I was in a camp and we were in the same situation. I think I was 12. A cottager rescued the whole group. We pay these things forward.

Safety Note – Canoeing is like driving the 401 in winter. You have to allow for a bad day, and just stay put. Do not be crazy. There is no way these guys would have made it, and I've seen the lake much worse. They were lulled by the lake being glass smooth the last time they went. Today it is glass smooth again.

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Ok, enough of the basics, it'll just zoom over the heads of all those 'non-math' scientists who seem to control our lives through oral skills.

Let's get down to injection. If I insert my hose into a bed of clay, nothing much happens. The water stops, since the clay is impermeable, that is, a very low permeability. I can pump up the water, which produces a very high pressure gradient in the clay, but no work is done (work is energy, or force times distance).

I can then put my hose into a bed of gravel. I can turn up the pumps, and get a huge flow. However, there is virtually no pressure gradient, because the gravel is extremely permeable. The gravel doesn't move.

Weird things only happen when I get a pressurized channel, which happens when I inject into shale. In that case, I get the best of both worlds, the channel is permeable (but blocked at the end), and the shale is not. There is a high pressure gradient, and available energy. The shale parts on a bedding plane, and my pumps are howling with the flow. Tremendous work is being done, as I crack apart the rock.

So, seismologists are lost when you have a real situation, such as a fault. To pry the fault apart, and allow slip, you need a pressure gradient, normal to the fault (right angles to). If the rock is as permeable as the fault, then you can't get a pressure gradient no matter what you do. The losers at my old company unnecessarily anchored lots of dams because they measured water pressure under the dam. But the concrete was as permeable as the rock, so no pressure gradient. They thought the water pressure would lift the dam, and send it down the river. Just one more thing that contributed to my breakdown. :)

In the Precambrian rock under Oklahoma, you either have open-channel flow, or the rock is tight. You can't form any gradients in open channels. That is why they are able to inject huge amounts of water. No pressure gradient, no effect on faults. The granite will never act like shale being fractured and pried apart.

There you have it. The USGS and 'consensus science' has it all wrong. That is why you have earthquakes where there aren't any high-flow injection wells. There is another reason, and I've gone over it enough -- stress corrosion.

All those points contacting the grain express the full vector surface forces including shear. Since the grain is at rest, the forces sum to zero. When the beaker is filled with water, there is a hydrostatic pressure gradient. Within the water itself, these forces balance to zero, and there is no flow, but the grain is exposed to a gradient.

The pressure is greater on the bottom than on the top. So if sum the forces, there is uplift, which is called buoyancy. The skeleton stresses on the grains are reduced, that is, the effective stress is reduced. Now, here's the thing that loses seismologists. If we filled the beaker with more water, or we attach a big pressure hose, there is no difference. The gradients remain the same.

If we attach a hose to the bottom, and start injecting water, we get an unbalanced pressure gradient in the water, and it begins to flow upward (if we allow it to). If we sum the forces on the grain, we find the balance goes to zero if the gradient keeps increasing, until it becomes zero, and the grain has no effective stress. That is quick sand. (Let's ignore viscous drag.)

If we reverse the pressure gradient downwards, then the effective stress increases, and the sand becomes as hard as rock.

Wednesday, July 1, 2015

This is physics as I love it - primal. The most important formula of physics is F=ma. Force is mass times acceleration. For us, it is better to invert it a bit -- a=F/m or zero acceleration means zero force.

Of course, nothing is simple since force and acceleration are vectors and everything must be summed. This leads to the first study in engineering, that of statics and a force-balance diagram. For, if you want something to stay still, like a building, you must balance all the forces.

You calculate it with a force-balance diagram, and if you want to learn anything here, go off and study it. Then come back. You couldn't believe the anguish in my Statics class. Some people just couldn't get it, and had to drop out of engineering. They went on to be seismologists and climate scientists. :)

So, we'll start with a soil particle, a nice shiny grain of quartz, since I like quartz. How does it live down there?

This grain does not live by himself. He is squished by the other grains. If he turned colour by the amount of squeezing, this would reflect the 'effective stress'. There could come a point where the effective stress is very high, and he could crack.

There is one thing that could relieve him of some cracking pressure (stress), and that's water. As I said in my Wikipedia explanation, we would have these quartz grains in a beaker, and fill it with water. Those seismologists would do well to read this. :) They are bitching about the lack of references, but there's nothing! Filling with water introduces some very interesting physics.

I am about to embark on a geotechnical lecture. I am inspired by the Callie seismologists suddenly hauling out effective stress as the cause of the Oklahoma earthquakes. They've never used water before! But now they are misusing the poor thing, as it has always been misused.